Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm not intrinsically against the idea, but if you're going to teach children this sort of skill, the teachers themselves are going to have to be a bit more brutally honest with themselves about what the children actually deal with, or it really will just be one more feel-good exercise of no value.
Recollecting himself, Reedhom sat up straight. “Mommy,
I don’t like it when you scream at me,” he announced
firmly.
“Good,” Wade said. “And maybe your mommy will say: ‘I’m
sorry, Reedhom. I had to go somewhere in a hurry, and I
got a little mad. I’m sorry.’ ”
If this is going to work, the teachers are going to have to step out of the fuzzy-wuzzy bubble of school and address the real world interactions the children might actually experience, and not slant the coverage, so to speak.
Thus, we teach children to say "Mommy, I don't like it when you scream at me", and we don't teach parents how to deal with children so they don't get to the point of screaming at them so often.
And while that's going on we have children being raped and murdered by their parents. About 5 children per day die in the US because of abuse or neglect. (http://www.childhelp.org/pages/statistics/)
(https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/factsheets/fatality.cfm)
(http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/childmaltreatment/data...)
(http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/cm_datasheet2012-a...)
> In 2010, an estimated 1,560 children died from child maltreatment(rate of 2.1per 100,000 children)
> Of the children who died from maltreatment in 2010, 40.8% experienced multiple maltreatment types, 32.6% experienced neglect only, and 22.9% experienced physical abuse only.
> Of child maltreatment fatalities in 2010, 79.4% occurred among children younger than age 4; 11.1% among 4-7 year olds; 3.6% among 8-11 year-olds; 3.8% among 12-15 year olds; and 1.8% among 16-17 year-olds
[1] Obviously some children do need to be medicated. But there's a worrying amount of over-prescribing of strong psychoactive meds among young people without much evidence of efficacy or need.
This is part of what I mean by brutal honesty. There's a nontrivial percentage of the children who will be going home to an environment in which nicely expressing your own feelings is, to put it nicely, not going to work. However much this fact sucks, it needs to be faced up to and handled. A curriculum that assumes all parents are perfectly enlightened liberal angels all the time is going to end up anti-teaching the children. (After all, even the most enlightened of us get frazzled at one time or another.) A curriculum that could do that would actually be extraordinarily useful, which is why I say I'm not intrinsically against the idea... but I'll cop to believing that the actual educational institutions and educators we have are ill-suited to this, though.
Kids are completely amoral. And as attractive as that sounds to some people here, let's just say that without adult oversight it won't take more than a week or so until the first murder happens (depending on age, but at 3-4 years, definitely).
So teaching children to be more closed and more sophisticated makes them more dangerous as well as better able to deal with the world. You may want to wait until the idea that you can't just kill, steal, and so on has sunk in (we're talking 7-8 years at least, preferably later).
Source: raised by the daughter of a behavioral scientist.
How about every day for a child less than a year old?
How about more than four times a day for an eight year old?
How about more screaming than talking for a fourteen your old?
But I reject your statement. Children almost never need to be screamed at, and it is not good for them.
Child goes to touch sharp/hot/poisonous item
My likely response would be "Leave it alone" or something similar, in a considerably louder and more imperative voice than normal instruction. Why? Because the change in tone conveys importance, and the shock will institute an instant response from a child.
This is entirely separate from telling a child off for a misbehaviour already having occurred, which I agree rarely (if ever) should require "Screaming" as a method of conveying displeasure and attempting to prevent recurrence. Inevitably it will happen, because parents are human too and make errors of judgement and lack patience.
I am lost.
Why is screaming almost intrinsically "bad"?
You are trying to quantize behaviour and, sorry, it cannot be done. Would you ask how many times it is good to kiss one's mother? One? Ten? One hundred? Every time the child leaves? Just once? Uhu?
For me it is better to explain why I am angry or disappointed with a child's behavior in private, and if I don't see a change then implement a punishment like missing recess, changing seats, or sending the child to talk to a counselor/principal. I worked with younger kids, so these were pretty effective punishments.
If you resort to screaming right away, the child won't open up to you about problems at home, problems with teasing, etc. that are important to understanding why they might be acting out. If the child trusts and likes you, they'll try harder to behave for you... it's really not very different than an adult relationship.
Another thing they are likely to learn... disconnect yourself from the outcome. Yeh your mom may not react the way you want. But at least you have been honest about your feelings and not disrespected the other person. You can only control what you do... not how others react.
From my perspective (and probably that of most psychology and behavioral science researchers) that behavior on the part of your mother is unhealthy and not to be tolerated. You are also unlikely to find support among academic for the notion that a grown woman's inability to control her emotions justifies inflicting severe pain on an largely helpless child. (There is some research supporting spanking, but almost never out condoning spanking while upset.)
That doesn't sound normal to me...
Talking back is a cardinal sin in the south. It is not how I will raise my kids, but my parents even grew up with corporal punishment in catholic school, so I don't really blame them.
EQ, I think, is best taught as the emotion arises. But if you're going to actually teach it as a cirriculum, you can't simply use words. That misses the point of the emotional aspect of the interaction.
Instead, use roleplaying where you have to move your body, as if you are in a play. And actually be able to generate the emotions coming up so that you feel it, and it leaks out as body gestures and facial expressions. Otherwise, it won't even be a "feel good" exercise, merely a checkbox to tick off on paper.
It is far, far easier to control a society when the people have very little emotional intelligence.
Coincidentally, I was browsing through my copy of Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power:
Look at the part of a person that is most visible --
their greed, their lust, their intense fear. These are
the emotions they cannot conceal, and over which they
have the least control. And what people cannot control,
you can control for them.
Those who understand power dynamics have no incentive to teach emotional intelligence. And for most people, actually working with emotions is very difficult and brings up a lot of ugly stuff. People generally don't want to.
When I was a kid, I learned from observing my father that being a "real man" means shaping the world according to your view of how it should be-- taking control, avenging wrongs, showing strength. In my 30's and 40's I've been totally reshaping my ideal of what a real man does, and it involves the opposite in many ways: making people feel safe, having excellent self control, and outstanding control of my emotions and attitude. The shocking thing to me is how often the behaviors I know as right according to my new ideals make me behave in ways that my father would see as pathetic and weak.
But it's completely possible to re-train one's own emotional composition and approach to life. That's what Stoicism is all about. I wish someone had taught me about this when I was young. A few things I wish I'd known about when I was a kid:
1. The No Complaining bracelet challenge[1]. This was life changing to me, because through this exercise I learned that "letting it all out" doesn't really help much, and what really helps is reshaping your own mind. I'm still doing this challenge today, as a life habit, even after several years.
2. Stop worrying and stop living[2]. You can boil this book down to a few pages, with a lot of stories that help you understand why and how. I did this book on audio during a long car trip. Also life changing for me.
3. Stoicism. Reading Letters from a Stoic[3] taught me that there was an entirely different way to look at friendship that I'd never considered. And it taught me that there are people who constantly practice controlling their emotions in a positive way, the way a martial artist constantly practices how to move his body.
[1] http://www.acomplaintfreeworld.org/
[2] http://www.amazon.com/How-Stop-Worrying-Start-Living/dp/0671...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Letters-Penguin-Classics-Lucius-Annaeu...
Words are better than fists.
"Stop I don't like that."
"Too bad." Shove.
"Stop I don't like it when you yell at me."
"TOO BAD! NEXT TIME DON'T DO SOMETHING TO DESERVE IT!"
A child can't control teh reaction to advocating for himself. And if he does so and the reaction is negative, he will quickly learn not to do so.
I don't have a solution, but I know that simply teaching this more appropriate method of self-advocacy isn't enough. And depending on the circumstances, it can easily backfire.
This is truth - but not an absolute.
When someone is using their fists against you, no words are going to protect you. While I do believe our society resorts to violence too quickly, there is a time and a place for the use of force, and I fear that we're swinging too far in the other direction.
I could be mistaken, but the former sure seems like the more pressing problem in practice. Are there advocates of taking it too far in the other direction? Of course, but there are advocates of just about everything. I would tend to save my worries regarding those advocates until the problem of resorting to violence too quickly recedes some, and the opposite problem becomes more prevalent outside of mere advocacy.
A generation ago, many conflicts in elementary through high school - especially between boys - were solved by physical confrontation. Two generations ago, it wouldn't have been uncommon for young adult men to come to blows. In neither of these cases would law enforcement have even been considered.
During my own time in public school, I saw the attitude change from "don't start a fight" to "if you get into a fight, both parties will be punished".
> I could be mistaken, but the former sure seems like the more pressing problem in practice.
Aggressive personalities are being shunned in our culture. Being "Alpha" is being construed as a negative thing, as a deficiency in some set of social skills that are presumably teachable.
> Are there advocates of taking it too far in the other direction? Of course, but there are advocates of just about everything. I would tend to save my worries regarding those advocates until the problem of resorting to violence too quickly recedes some, and the opposite problem becomes more prevalent outside of mere advocacy.
We're teaching our children that using violence represents a failure. I strongly believe the employing violence in defense of self or of a third party is entirely appropriate and in some cases the only morally coherent response to the violent aggression of others.
Instead, we should be showing our children how to form a rational basis for their actions and to consider their emotional responses in light of that.
Prefrontal cortex is still developing through our early twenties. Mitigating the effects of emotional responses takes work, just like any other discipline. That work grows synapses and it's the reason mental health therapies change connectivity patterns in the brain. Leaving the word 'emotion' out (which some here seem to have strong reactions to), self-regulation is well-understood.
It may also make children smarter. Davidson notes that because social-emotional training develops the prefrontal cortex, it can also enhance academically important skills like impulse control, abstract reasoning, long-term planning and working memory. Though it’s not clear how significant this effect is, a 2011 meta-analysis found that K-12 students who received social-emotional instruction scored an average of 11 percentile points higher on standardized achievement tests. A similar study found a nearly 20 percent decrease in violent or delinquent behavior.
Goleman isn't mentioned.
Early signs are that children can be 'prompted' to apply empathetic reasoning with the right interfaces, and this can be more effective than average teacher-guided instruction.
It's really tricky stuff to get right but there's definitely potential for improvement in this area. There has been (in Australia at least) a focus for the last few decades on teaching the definition of emotions - this is what sadness is, this is what anger is - and hoping that students get enough out of that to learn how to apply it in day to day like. Focusing on context and leaving it open enough for children to work it out for themselves seems to be more effective. Really tricky to actually pull that off in a classroom though.
I asked her, "I wonder how many of those get used during dodgeball tournaments?".
Only after practicing did I achieved some success in the above abilities, late in my 20s, and it has a huge impact on general well being, career trajectory etc.
The thing that we call IQ (or g) is a set of cognitive abilities in pattern recognition, problem solving, puzzles, symbol manipulation, and so forth. Insofar as "something" is measured by these kinds of tests, then IQ/g can be said to exist.
Similarly, the set of traits and behaviors collected under the umbrella of "emotional intelligence" are a grab bag of self-regulation, resilience, emotional self-control, insight into one's own mind, ability to form a working model of the emotions of others, ability to "read" the emotions of others, and so forth. These are less well defined than the abilities grouped under IQ/g but insofar as they could be measured through well-designed tests, then emotional intelligence can be said to exist.
Alternatively, there could be a functional or "effectiveness based" definition of emotional intelligence, even if it were less quantitative than IQ/g.
Arguing over definitions and labels is usually unproductive. I think in this case, it does dilute the idea of intelligence (being able to reason abstractly), while at the same time, increases the emphasis on high intelligence.
We'd all be better off just defocusing on intelligence, as a: there's little control you have over your intelligence, and b: it matters far, far, less than what some of us programming types might think, and c: focusing on an innate skill tends to come at a cost of not focusing on perseverance and work ethic, which matter far more.
Personally, I wish there'd been less emphasis on how smart I was as a kid; perhaps I'd have more discipline. But alas, thinking about algorithms causes far more short-term reward than, say, cold calling, yet the latter is far more likely to generate success for me.
That's not the definition of psychopathic trait (or disorder, or anti-social behavior) though. What characterizes it is diminished empathy and remorse, so in fact, it's a lack of emotional intelligence.
The point is that if you're free from remorse but still have a working mental model of other's emotions (like most humans), you can better manipulate other's intentions without guilty or other thoughts influencing your decisions.
We all fall somewhere inside an empathy spectrum, only the ones that fall at one extreme are characterized as bearer of psychopathic disorder, while the functional ones live normal (or almost normal) lives. There's a big chance you work for one actually, these people tend to be successful in leadership positions.
I suspect that lack of situational awareness and lack of concentration power/endurance is at the heart of most of these problems.
Knowing what to do isn't enough, you need to do it. But improving awareness and endurance of your awareness is only possible through months or years of training, especially meditation and trying to find more awareness in social situations.
all about how a lot of the need for emotional expression was invented at the esalean institute in the 60's and is also a type of conformity.
Please leave your pedantic quips on reddit.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence#Cannot_...
Locke suggests the use of the word skill instead; however the definition of intelligence is the ability to apply knowledge and skills.
Given that the NICHD is pushing for consensus, and that I am not (and neither are you, given your non-primary source) qualified to determine the status of EI, let's not dismiss it outright.
How about contributing meaningfully to the discussion instead of alternating between trolling and non-authorative copypasta?
The government has largely supported things that have torn the family apart, now as the "nanny" it is trying to pick up all the pieces and completely replace (little by little) what is left of it.
Why? well two reasons... 1. To maintain and gain ever larger amounts of power and control (which requires taking more and more freedom, privacy and choices away from the people). 2. To rid the world of God and religion (which is necessary for number one to even be a possibility).
The government must weaken the people and make them dependent on it. Best way to accomplish this is to destroy what creates strong communities. Family and faith.
If anything, I have observed a negative correlation. And I know some pretty f*ing smart people.